That's bordering on the "Nothing says a dead character can't take actions!" level of missing the point.
A short rest isn't just some game construct. It's a game construct which represents a definitive in-game reality. It represents that hour where you're not doing anything strenuous. And when you're not doing anything strenuous for an hour, you have time to do other things, like eat and tend to your wounds and recover spells. But the hour, alone, isn't enough to actually do all of those things; you need to actually do those things, to gain the benefits of doing them.
If you have no food whatsoever, but you take a series of short and long rests, you still (eventually) die from starvation. If you need a medkit to spend hit dice (because you're using that option), and you're injured at the start of a period of downtime, you can't spend those hit dice if you don't have a medkit; you need to actually tend to your wounds in order to gain that benefit. If you're a wizard and you want to recover spells by studying your spellbook, you can't do that if you don't have access to your spellbook, even if you rest for an hour; you actually need the spellbook there, and you need to be studying from it, in order to use that ability.
All short rests are a period of time, of at least a certain length, where you don't do anything too strenuous. It does not follow that all such periods of time are necessarily short rests, in much the same way that all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. The phrase you quoted describes a short rest, but is insufficient to define it.
Or if you wanted to be super pedantic about, which is kind of the opposite of what 5E is supposed to be about, then you can say that an hour which just passed uneventfully was a short rest... it was just a short rest where you didn't get to recover spells or spend Hit Dice or anything.
What you say makes some kind of sense, if you don't examine it too closely.
So let's look at it more closely. Because RPGs exist to entertain us, even though they follow the fictional lives of our characters they don't bother with the mundane, boring bits. This is also true for most films, books, TV shows, etc. within the genre of heroic fiction. These formats concentrate on the interesting things (fighting, exploring) but don't bother with the mundane (shaving, going to the toilet).
We, and the game, are happy to make the assumptions that our characters do the mundane things necessary for a normal life. We don't expect to have to detail these things. We hand-wave them. Good! Who'd want to detail them?
DM: Your PC explodes.
Player: What? WTF? Why?
DM: It's been three in-game weeks since you mentioned that your PC has gone to the toilet. The pressure eventually got too much for your PCs intestines,
Player: .....Don't I even get a saving throw? Constitution?
DM: No, but thanks for reminding me; everyone within 20 feet needs to make a Dex save!
Eating, drinking, shaving, evacuating bowels/bladder are assumed to take place off camera, and I think you'd agree that this makes for a better game. No-one is saying our PCs don't do these things! We are saying that they
do do these things, but that we don't detail them. And, if these is something that prevents you doing any of these things then that may become an in-game problem that we do need to detail. I'm thinking more about lack of food here, rather than lack of toilet paper.
So, the short rest. It's an hour. In theory (but not RAW), you should eat, drink, bandage wounds. Go to the toilet. In RAW, you can't do anything more strenuous than that.
What are the game mechanic benefits of a short rest? Regaining abilities which recharge on a short rest (Ki points, Second Wind, Superiority Dice, Pact Magic spell slots, etc.), spending hit dice to heal.
There is no rule that says that if you don't consume X number of calories
during that rest then you cannot recharge these things. We have trail rations, canteens for water. We could and almost certainly do eat/drink whenever we have a moment if we want, and these moments are not confined by the rules to official short rests.
The short rest does not include eating for a solid hour, drinking for a solid hour, urinating for a solid hour, bandage wounds for a solid hour, or any of these mundane things. We can imagine that our PCs have the opportunity to do any of these things during that hour if they want to, but
crucially they also have the opportunity to do any of those things during spare moments
outside of that officially designated short rest hour.
Although we can assume that if we haven't eaten or drunk for too long, then we don't get the benefits of a
long rest, there is no such assumption for short rests beyond the fact that if we haven't eaten for days then we also haven't eaten for hours. In other words, failing to eat
during a short rest has no in-game effect (it doesn't prevent you from gaining the benefits of a short rest), while failing to eat for a day might very well affect your long rest.
So if you don't actually eat/drink/etc. the mundane stuff
during that specific hour, but just hand-wave the snacks/canteen use/bandaging as you travel, if you realise that you haven't done anything strenuous for the last hour then yes, you get the benefit of a short rest! We assume/hand-wave the mundane stuff whether or not it's taken place within that specific hour.
So, what do we need the hour for, if it's not for those mundane things we can hand-wave as happening any time?
The hour is to actually rest! To get our breath back, get our adrenaline levels back to normal (for adventurers). Those abilities (Second Wind, Superiority Dice, etc.) are regained through not doing anything strenuous.
Even the spending of hit dice! Remember that hit points are not meat in D&D. Hit points also represent expending energy, luck, experience, all sorts of fluff things that attempt to reconcile the idea that we get more of them as we get more experienced in a way that is totally incompatible with actually gaining 20 times our body mass over our adventuring careers!
This is the kind of thing that can be recovered by actually resting, rather than requiring medical attention. To further illustrate that, the Second Wind ability lets you regain hit points. By, conceptually, 'getting your breath back'. That's why it's called Second Wind and not Unexplained Non-Magical Body Tissue Regeneration.
So we already hand-wave eating/drinking/bandaging/urinating to take place as and when, rather than having to take place with pre-defined 'short rest hours'. That means that if we notice that we
have done nothing strenuous within the last hour, then yes we gain the benefits of a short rest. We already assumed eating, drinking and so on; there is no need to sit down for an official meal for a short rest to give its benefits.
